Corsair Neutron and Neutron GTX SSD review

Product showcase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

Behold Corsair's 4th generation of SSDs. But first, packaging as shown above.

So Corsair's latest and greatest comes in 120GB and 240GB packages. Performance is listed at 555MB/s read and 511MB/s write with 85,000~90,000 IOPS at 4k random write aligned disk access with our tested 240GB GTX model. The normal version has slower writes at 370 Mb/sec which is still seriously fast of course.

And there they are, these are the 2.5" SATA 3 (6 Gbps) SSD versions all packaged up in the bundle. You should easily be able to place them somewhere in your chassis. Small and light-weight. The SSD supports TRIM making sure your SSD will retain its speed once in idle.

Obviously you do need to connect it to a proper SATA 3 (6G) controller though, the best ones can be found on the Intel series 6/7 chipset based products (H67/P67/Z68/X79/H77/Z77). Included in the bundle is a 3.5" bracket, SATA cable, some screws and one SSD.

Corsair's GTX series is red colored, the normal model blue, what you'll notice is that the SSDs are a hint thinner then your average SSD at 7mm.

When we look at the connectors, we spot the standard power and Serial ATA connectors. These drives are SATA3 (6G). Obviously the drivers are backwards compatible with SATA2 as well, but with the bandwidth limitation there performance would be capped to roughly 270 MB/sec (which still is silly fast compared to HDDs).

 A proper SATA 6G cable is recommended and should be delivered with your motherboard. We however never ever had issues with a standard or any other SATA2 cable either. It seems that SATA3 cables are a little thicker, that's all.

The SSD itself has a metal body, made up of a top and bottom cover that snap together without the use of screws.
 

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